Here & Now

Here & Now for April 15, 2022

Announcer:

The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Frederica Freyberg:

School districts prepare for summer instruction. As educators make up for lost time in the classroom. An overheated housing market is setting off alarms, and all eyes are on the Wisconsin Supreme Court over the highly anticipated redistricting decision.

I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” Law Professor Robert Yablon explains what the high court is doing with legislative voting boundaries. A millennial couple shares the hardships of home buying, and a summer school leader in Green Bay defines success. It’s “Here & Now” for April 15.

Announcer:

Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Tonight, a decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court on legislative redistricting maps. And it’s a loss for Democrats. The court voted 4-3 to adopt the Republican Legislature’s maps instead of those of Governor Tony Evers that it originally approved. Justice Brian Hagedorn was the swing vote in both cases. In what dissenting justices tonight called a disheartening odyssey, this decision follows a Republican challenge that had the U.S. Supreme Court sending the case back to the state court. At issue in this case, the number of majority-minority Assembly districts in Milwaukee. The Wisconsin high court majority wrote in its decision, “The maps proposed by the governor are racially motivated and under the equal protection clause they fail strict scrutiny. By contrast, the maps proposed by the Wisconsin Legislature are race neutral. Governor Tony Evers weighed in tonight, calling the decision an unconscionable miscarriage of justice and outrageous. Expert and UW Law School Professor Robert Yablon joins us to discuss. Professor, thanks very much for being here.

Robert Yablon:

Good to be with you.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what’s your reaction to this decision?

Robert Yablon:

Well, this is a big decision and a big turnaround from earlier in the case, when the governor’s map prevailed. Now the state Supreme Court adopted as its own the map the legislature passed and the governor vetoed. And this is a highly unusual decision in a number of respects. It’s a decision that in effect nullifies the force of the governor’s veto. The state Supreme Court steps in and, in effect, decides that even though the governor said this is not a map that the state should have, it’s adopted anyway. It also goes well beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court required the state Supreme Court to do. The only districts that the U.S. Supreme Court took issue with were those handful of majority-minority districts in the Milwaukee area. All that needed to be done was to have those districts re-drawn in a more race-neutral manner but instead the Wisconsin Supreme Court chose to jettison the governor’s map entirely and embrace the legislature’s entirely.

Frederica Freyberg:

So we were just speaking to the Milwaukee Assembly districts, but what about for the rest of the state’s legislative districts, where the Evers maps would have given Democrats a chance to win but the GOP maps lock in that solid majority?

Robert Yablon:

So this map, the map that the legislature passed last fall, is one that reinforces the partisan gerrymander that this state has had for the last decade, and it means that although this state is often a 50/50 state, one where Democrats frequently manage to win statewide races, they’re going to have virtually no chance of taking control of the legislature. If anything, the issue we might see coming up in 2022 is whether the Republicans will be able to win a veto-proof majority in the legislature.

Frederica Freyberg:

So the Wisconsin Supreme Court said there was insufficient evidence to justify drawing state legislative districts on the basis of race and that by contrast, the maps proposed by the legislature are race-neutral and legal. Are the keywords there “insufficient evidence” or did they get that right?

Robert Yablon:

I do think that that is the key from their perspective. What the U.S. Supreme Court said is that it wasn’t convinced that the governor had introduced enough evidence. The governor on a remand to the Wisconsin Supreme Court offered to introduce more, the justices didn’t want that extra evidence, said he’d had a sufficient chance, and found that evidence insufficient. Now, the dissenters disagree with that. The dissenters also question whether the legislature’s map was indeed race neutral as they said it was.

Frederica Freyberg:

For his part, Justice Brian Hagedorn seemed to agree with this insufficient evidence, even as he sided with conservatives to adopt the Republican map saying that the record before the court was incomplete, but there was no time to develop it. What did you think of his comments?

Robert Yablon:

Well, you know, he lamented the position that the court found itself in. Now, the court could have taken some additional evidence. The governor offered to put that evidence in the record quite quickly, but I think the justices felt like it was getting fairly late in the game. Another part of what Justice Hagedorn was getting at is that the court didn’t really imagine itself to be fully litigating a voting rights challenge in this case at all. The main reason that this case was being heard was because of the population inequalities in the districts after the last census. So he said had they known from the beginning that the Voting Rights Act was going to be the central issue, they probably would have handled things differently, but in his view, they were kind of stuck at this point.

Frederica Freyberg:

How difficult does this late decision make it for election clerks at this point?

Robert Yablon:

Well, what this means is that the Wisconsin Elections Commission is going to very quickly need to try to go through the administrative steps of entering this new map into the system. Today was the day that candidates were supposed to be able to start collecting nomination signatures for themselves. I suspect that the Wisconsin Elections Commission will get on this quickly and that they’ll be able to do that next week, and so the time for collecting those petitions will only have been diminished somewhat, but this is going to create some headaches, no doubt, for election administrators.

Frederica Freyberg:

How will this decision go down in legal history in your mind?

Robert Yablon:

I suspect not very well. As someone who has studied court-drawn maps across the country, it is almost unheard of for a court to adopt as its own a map that is so strikingly gerrymandered. Both state and federal courts across the country have generally taken their obligations to being neutral and non-partisan extremely seriously, and so to see a judicial gerrymander of this kind really is something that stands out.

Frederica Freyberg:

Professor Yablon, thank you. Thank you for joining us tonight.

Robert Yablon:

Good to talk to you.

Frederica Freyberg:

Also this week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission regarding the use of absentee ballot drop boxes. Lawyers for the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty argued there is not an exception to having anyone other than the voter deliver their own absentee ballot either by way of the mailbox or to the clerk’s office.

Rick Esenberg:

In this instance, the legislature has decided that much like, much as you must go to the polls yourself, you cannot send any — you cannot take your son with you to, you know, help you fill out your ballot and deliver it to the clerk. You must do it yourself.

Frederica Freyberg:

But advocates from Disability Rights Wisconsin argue this discriminates against anyone unable to physically do so.

Barbara Beckert:

They may be unable to move their arm due to MS, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injury or other health conditions. They may not have arms, but they do have the constitutional right to vote.

Frederica Freyberg:

Washington came to Wisconsin this week. A U.S. House Select Committee held a field hearing on Milwaukee housing inequalities, and how to address them to expand wealth building. The chair of the committee was joined by Wisconsin U.S. Representatives Republican Bryan Steil and Democrat Gwen Moore.

Gwen Moore:

Home ownership has been a key way to build generational wealth. Milwaukee has a 29% point gap in Black to white home ownership. Black home ownership is just 27%. And Milwaukee is losing an estimated thousand homeowners in neighborhoods of color every year. Like for renters, the difficulties for first-time home buyers are myriad.

Bryan Steil:

We spent today earlier on a bus tour through Congresswoman Moore’s district, seeing actually a lot of the similar challenges that we see in cities across the state of Wisconsin. We see often older housing stock and the challenge that that places on families with repairs.

Frederica Freyberg:

The committee heard from experts and citizens about programs that help breathe new life into Milwaukee’s housing stock and help would-be buyers. For many people wanting to purchase, low interest rates set off a home-buying craze, and low supply sent house prices soaring. This hits hard for millennials in the peak home-buying age who have to make tough choices their parents never did. Marisa Wojcik met with a couple of them.

Amy Sampson:

Each week we put an offer on a house. With the market the way it is, all those offers were between like 15,000 and 50,000 over the list price, and just like saying that out loud is scary.

Rebecca LeBeau:

It’s really hard to keep your spirits up doing that every week.

Marisa Wojcik:

Rebecca LeBeau and Amy Sampson describe the realty reality that many first-time home buyers are going through right now, particularly millennials.

Rebecca LeBeau:

We were just ready to put our roots down here. We figured we would struggle. I don’t think we were expecting quite the struggle that it has been.

Marisa Wojcik:

For six straight weeks, the couple made offer after offer.

Rebecca LeBeau:

We bid 40 over on one house and it ended up going for 75 over. And that was, I think, one of the lower points so far.

Lindsey Cooper:

It’s hard when there’s not a hard logic to do it the way we’re doing it. It’s just this is the game you have to play to get in the house.

Marisa Wojcik:

As their realtor, Lindsey Cooper guided them through the difficult process of finding their home.

Lindsey Cooper:

There’s a lot of cases where people can’t afford to be their own neighbor. It’s just getting tighter and tighter.

Marisa Wojcik:

A disorienting and emotional roller coaster and in the current housing market, unavoidable.

Lindsey Cooper:

I was already in January writing offers that were 10 to 20% above asking. With limited contingencies and lots of forgiveness. It was — it was just what needed to be done. If you talk to the list agent and you know they have 15 other offers and you know they’re strong, you just don’t have any other option but to be as competitive as you can be.

Marisa Wojcik:

A perfect storm of factors led to this point of high demand and low supply.

Lindsey Cooper:

When the pandemic started heating up, the market essentially just got tight. You know, people didn’t want to leave their home. They were scared about their health and safety. Construction kind of came apart at the seams because supply was really tricky. Prices were skyrocketing. It’s gut-wrenching to know that it’s all about how much cash you have on hand.

Marisa Wojcik:

Her clients were determined and perhaps more importantly, patient. Finally, they got an accepted offer.

Amy Sampson:

That week was spring break, and it seemed like everybody was waiting to post their houses on spring break week, so there ended up being a lot of supply that week.

Rebecca LeBeau:

It’s a two-bedroom house on the east side. It’s not the biggest house but it’s like a great starter house for us to grow into.

Marisa Wojcik:

But even their happy ending came with its own contingencies.

Rebecca LeBeau:

We’re making decisions that our parents never had to make about, like, okay, if buying a house is important to us, then we’re maybe not going to have kids or we’re going to have one kid instead of two kids. And I see articles about, like, millennials not having kids and it’s like, yeah, we can’t — we can’t afford houses. Daycare is the same as a mortgage, like, how are we going to do that? There’s just no way to do that. And so we’re having those conversations, like, okay, maybe kids aren’t for us if we can’t afford them.

Amy Sampson:

Just build our cats a really nice cat-io.

Marisa Wojcik:

For “Here & Now,” I’m Marisa Wojcik in Madison.

Frederica Freyberg:

If they can’t buy, millennials stay with renting, pushing those prices up. Our next guest, UW-Madison professor and housing expert Kurt Paulsen calls the need for affordable housing a five-alarm fire and the factors leading to it a perfect storm.

Kurt Paulsen:

The reason it’s a perfect storm for housing right now is, prior to COVID, you had a real difficult situation in the housing market. We weren’t building enough homes, and we weren’t building enough rentals. So prices are already up, people are already stressed in being able to buy. And then you just layer COVID on top of it, that’s why it’s a perfect storm. The other reason it’s a perfect storm is COVID messed with the supply chain. So in the long run, one of the ways to solve the housing crisis is to build more homes, right, because there’s high demand for housing so you need to build more. But now builders are building fewer units in ’21 than we did in 2020. Because you can’t get garage doors, you can’t get appliances, you can’t get carpeting, and the price of lumber is five or six times what it used to be prior to COVID. So anything that’s new, being constructed, is really expensive. And that doesn’t solve the affordability problem at all.

Frederica Freyberg:

By how much does demand outstrip the supply?

Kurt Paulsen:

So in Wisconsin, for example, we built, last year, about 10,000 single-family homes. And I estimate in a normal market, we should build about 30,000 homes. So we’re about one-third of where we need to be. We underproduce thousands of housing units every year relative to population growth and job growth, and that doesn’t even account for in some of our fast growing job centers, which would be Dane County, Waukesha County, Brown and Outagamie, Green Bay, Appleton, there’s far more jobs than there are housing units, so people who want to work there can’t even find a decent place to live.

Frederica Freyberg:

The other thing that you described this as was as a five-alarm fire. Why?

Kurt Paulsen:

Well, it should be ringing alarm bells in every state and local policy makers, you know, system to understand, we need to do something now, because if we don’t do something now, it’s only going to get worse. But it should be a five-alarm fire, but it never quite rises to that level because the legislature and local governments oftentimes don’t think they have the capacity or the policy to really address some of the macro issues in terms of the supply chain, but they can address the local zoning and the local financing to make sure that new housing units are built.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because what are the implications of it going forward, if it continues in this way?

Kurt Paulsen:

So if we continue on the path we’re on, house prices keep going up, and that means a couple of things. For first-time home buyers, for moderate income households, particularly for Black and Hispanic households, that means that entry level rung on the housing ladder is pulled up, which means you can’t buy a home. And even if you have good credit, you can’t find something that’s in your price range. So a lot of these households will stay renters for a long period of time, and that puts pressure on the rental market, causing the rents to go up on the low end. So when supply is squeezed, it affects everyone, but it disproportionately affects people on the lower end of the wage scale. The other implication is, millennials, the largest generation in history, are at their peak home buying age. They’re about 30 or 31 years old. If they can’t find a decent place to live, they’re going to move to another state. So if you want to keep your workforce, you have to house your workforce.

Frederica Freyberg:

So in the market as it currently exists, should millennials who might be seeking the American dream of home ownership just forget about it?

Kurt Paulsen:

My advice to millennials would be, first of all, you should hoot and holler and get angry because that opportunity that was available to your parents is not available, and pressure policy makers to do something. But on a practical matter, you just have to start getting your finances in order, make sure that you have savings for a down payment, pay off any student loan debt that you can, but I’ll be honest, a lot of millennials are pretty frustrated. Because they see that that dream is increasingly out of reach. And even if they play by the rules and save and go to college and get a good job, they just can’t afford a decent entry level home.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because what is the average cost of a home now in Wisconsin?

Kurt Paulsen:

Well, it really varies. So in some parts of the state, the median price is about $180,000 or $200,000. But in places like Dane or Waukesha County, the median price is well over $300,000. And part of what is driving this is, when the cost to build something new goes up, the cost of all the existing homes also goes up. Because the closest substitute to a new home is an existing home and the closest substitute to an existing home is a new home. So if you own your home now, you’re very happy. Because prices have skyrocketed. So on paper, at least, you’re much more wealthy. But if you’re looking to buy, you can’t find anything in your price range, and then as you also know the stories, there’s 20 or 30 bidders, all cash, asking over the asking price, and so again, for anyone who’s a first-time home buyer, particularly if you’re using like a VA loan or a USDA loan or an FHA loan, one of those affordable starter home products, you’re going to lose out to someone who’s offering all cash.

Frederica Freyberg:

Does the market kind of cool at all with the interest rates going up?

Kurt Paulsen:

Yes. Absolutely. So interest rates for mortgages have gone up over 1 percentage point or 100 basis points since Christmas. So that means, again, for that first-time home buyer, that kind of moderate-income millennial, the house you could buy now is less, because of the interest rate. So the same income translates into less mortgage. So it’s a double whammy, right? It’s actually a triple whammy because your rent is going up so you can’t save for a down payment, the money you do have doesn’t go as far, and there’s just a shortage of supply so the prices are out of reach. So it won’t crash, but it means that thousands of people in this state who otherwise would own a home are just never going to own a home.

Frederica Freyberg:

Paulsen says he doesn’t see the crunch for home buyers getting better for at least three to five years, because of supply-chain issues and rising interest rates.

On the education front, parents and teachers know what the pandemic and remote learning meant for students during the 2020 school year. Loss of learning and social supports. Last year in Green Bay schools, students saw robust summer school options to make up for lost time in the classroom. But what about summer school options this year? Lisa Johnson is the associate director of the district’s summer school program. We talked with her late this week. Lisa, thanks very much for joining us.

Lisa Johnson:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So take us back to summer school in 2021 in your district. Describe what the offerings were, which you deployed almost in a wrap-around way.

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, we did. We really looked at the whole picture. We talked to our families and our students. What did they — what met their needs? What we really looked at and said families were struggling with things like childcare services at that point in time. A lot of places in our community had closed or weren’t back up to where they had been pre-pandemic. So we really said okay, how do we meet those needs and our kids’ needs? So we moved from half day programming to full day programming, and we really created a robust program around both academics, because we knew coming back from virtual learning and the pandemic that our kids needed that component piece, and we also knew we needed to have some fun too. It was still summer. And so we needed to do those enrichment things and we should try to find that right balance by bringing in community partners and bringing in lots of different people as a community, so thinking about it from a whole community standpoint.

Frederica Freyberg:

So according to a new report, Green Bay really rose to the top across the state for your summer school programming. Could you in your mind or should your district be a model for others?

Lisa Johnson:

That’s a great question. When we go back and reflect on it, I do think there were some great things that we did learn over that time frame. We made a very concerted effort on using summer to help us from that recovery of the pandemic after being virtual, and I do think there’s a lot of things, and there’s a lot of things we’re hoping to continue in the future that we did as well, and hopefully other districts can learn from that model that we put in place.

Frederica Freyberg:

So how was the district able to fund all of that programming last summer, and ramp up staffing to do that?

Lisa Johnson:

So the only way we were able to do it is with the COVID relief dollars which unfortunately are one-time dollars. That is one of the things we are really having to look at is, can we sustain this without that funding source. State reimbursement for summer school doesn’t cover everything that we were able to put in place for last summer. And so that is something that we know is a gap in the future, and what does that look like to be able to sustain this long term.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what were the outcomes once students returned in the fall? Could you see that after the summer?

Lisa Johnson:

You know, it’s a great thing. We know summer school is not a silver bullet but yes, we could certainly see the kids that attended summer school, they came back ready to learn. We didn’t see that typical summer slide. For an elementary student, if they come to summer school, you can see over the course of time, they make up their learning and we didn’t see that slide that normally happens in the summer. We also saw that they were ready from that social/emotional standpoint and regulated to be in class again. And just would come back ready to learn. So between the work we did to prevent and that social/emotional component piece of it, we definitely saw great things, and not that loss of learning time coming back to school just to reground ourselves.

Frederica Freyberg:

So do you feel as though students in the Green Bay district who took part in these summer school programs made up any deficits that resulted from kind of remote learning during the peak of the pandemic?

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, we did make up some remote deficits within that time frame for our kids. Whether that was at elementary level in terms of their reading component pieces or at secondary, which was some credits and some credit courses for kids that may not have been able to finish it through that virtual model, which wasn’t necessarily their best learning component piece to learn virtually.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what was the response from families to have these options, even including transportation to and from summer school?

Lisa Johnson:

So our families definitely responded. We had over 7,000 students of our 19,000 students attend summer school last year. So we saw a great outpouring of response from our families in sending their kids to summer.

Frederica Freyberg:

So this summer, will the programming be reduced because of the funding?

Lisa Johnson:

Yeah, unfortunately our programming will be reduced. We are going to keep full day. We had to be creative with that. We are doing some full-day models that will be summer school-run, both morning/afternoon with district teachers and we’re prioritizing our Title 1 schools and our achievement gap reduction schools for that programming. And then other schools what we did is we had to be creative and we said we’re going to provide summer school in the morning and then we partnered with our local YMCA who went out and got a large grant that is helping to subsidize the cost for families for that afternoon. So it still provides our families that full-day option that they need to have a place for their kids to be all day, but also keeps our families being able to engage in that summer school component piece in the morning.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, bravo to Green Bay. Thanks very much. Thanks for joining us.

Lisa Johnson:

Thank you for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

In environmental news, the state DNR has no authority to regulate the clean-up of PFAS or forever chemicals under Wisconsin law. That’s according to a Waukesha County court ruling this week. Instead, the regulation would have to go through the legislature’s rule-making process. PFAS are a group of toxic chemicals that leach into drinking and groundwater and derive from such things as firefighting foam. Communities across the state are dealing with PFAS contamination of their water. The DNR expects to appeal the ruling.

For more on this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at PBSwisconsin.org and click on the news tab. That’s our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a good weekend.

Announcer:

Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.